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April 21 will be the french 15M under the slogan ‘They don’t represent us!’

The day before the first turn of the presidential elections in France, and two weeks before the second turn, the ‘indignés’ decided to unite all the people who don’t feel themselves represented by the candidates to denunce these elections decided in advance, the bipartisme, the manipulation of the media, the repression against our mouvement, the financial dictatorship, and to reclaim a real democracy now.

Before the election thousands of people will come out in the streets to celebrate the power of the people and to proclaim their desire for a Real Democracy and the rejection of representation deregulated! Action festive, convivial and demanding of a new society. Signs of political affiliation are prohibited, come as you are. It is not at all a call to “All rotten” but rather a denunciation of the system of representation. The delegation of power, it is not power to the people, this is not democracy. That’s what we denounce!

After crossing the territory, six marches coming from Bayonne, Marseille, Toulouse, Quimper, Lille and the suburb of Paris will meet in the center of Paris and start a big demonstration passing by the National Assembly to do a performance, blocking the Concorde, and arriving to the famous ‘Champs de Mars’ to organise a people’s assembly and to start a camp at the foot of Eiffel Tower. They will stay until the end of the elections to organise actions, to meet and unite a maximum of workers for the 1/15 of May and to promote the 12M Global Day. At the time at which I write this article, 18 cities are calling to support what we are yet calling ‘The French 15M’....

A few months ago, an alternative currency was introduced in the Greek port city of Volos. It was a grass-roots initiative that has since grown into a network of more than 800 members, in a community struggling to afford items in euros during a deepening financial crisis. The handicrafts stall at Volos central market lies at the end, just past the homemade jams. After perusing what there is on offer, Hara Soldatou picks out a set of decorated candles, delighted with her purchase. “They cost me 24 TEM, which I built up by offering yoga classes,” she says. Wherever you wander through the market area, one thing you won’t need in your pocket is money. From jewellery to food, electrical parts to clothes, everything here is on sale through a local alternative currency called TEM. It works as an exchange system. If you have goods or services to offer, you gain credit, with one euro equivalent to one TEM. You can then use your “savings” to buy whatever else is being offered through the network, leading to some rather original exchanges of goods. It’s all reminiscent of an ancient bartering system returning to today’s Greece. “I can get language classes or computer lessons in return”, says Stavros Ntentos from his stall where he sells children’s underwear. “It’s a very good idea because we need to make people realise we can all buy and sell something; we don’t only need euros.” “We have reached the bottom of our lives and we now have to think in a different way,” says Tasos, a vegetable-seller....

The left in Greece is historically strong but hobbled by divisions. Within the General Confederation of Greek Workers (the umbrella union for private sector workers) the political composition of the executive committee is decided in elections. The last vote was two years ago, before the consequences of the crisis hit, so Pasok, the pro-austerity social democratic party, is still well represented, while outside its support has crumbled from 44 per cent in 2009 to 8 per cent in a February poll.

At the confederation’s HQ, Vagelis Moutafis, a Pasok member of the executive, jokes about possible national elections. ‘Next time I’m going to vote for one of the small parties,’ he says: ‘Pasok!’

Also present are union officials from the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza). In contrast to the KKE, here the question of the euro is fudged. ‘In or out of the eurozone – such a debate does not exist at the official level,’ says one official. ‘There’s a lot of talk about the euro but the claims of the Greek workers are very specific,’ says another.

What worries all trade unionists is the end of collective bargaining – a stipulation of ‘Memorandum II’, the neoliberal shopping list drawn up by the ‘troika’ of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF. Memorandum II demands a deep change in the structure of the Greek economy. It also requires a massive reduction in wages (22 per cent off the minimum wage, 32 per cent for those under 25), a 15 per cent cut in pensions, 150,000 public sector layoffs and various other cuts and privatisations.

It’s a big fight, yet the union officials disagree over whether they should work with the new movements thrown up by the crisis.

‘Together we could form a new power in society,’ offers Syriza’s Giorgos Gavrilis, hopefully. But the Pasok member thinks not: ‘It’s not easy to have connections with the new movements like the indignados. For me the unions are not for representing all of society, just the workers, pensioners and the unemployed. All other areas of society should be represented by political parties.’

Then the lights go off: it’s a power-cut. The trade unionists exclaim at once ‘Troika!’ – a moment of unity.

Indignados and anarchists

Here’s a recipe for a culture shock: leave the plush union HQ, with its high ceilings and neo-classical décor, and walk to a social centre in Exarcheia, the anarchist district of Athens, for a meeting with some indignados who will state, matter-of-factly, that ‘the top union officials are government functionaries’.

The indignados – also known as the Movement of the Squares – burst onto the scene in May last year with the occupation of Syntagma Square in central Athens. They were brutally evicted a month later, but their movement resonated.

The indignados and the anarchists are distinct (anarchism in Greece is strong and deep-rooted) but they share a dim view of the traditional left. ‘In Syntagma Square the people didn’t want to hear about political parties, even the left ones,’ says Alexandros Frantzis, an indignado. Although members of political groups like Syriza were present, they attended as individuals.

With the Communist KKE, relations were non-existent. ‘They thought if they got too close there were microbes or something,’ quips Alexandros. On 20 October it got more serious, with violent clashes between anarchists and KKE members. ‘The Communist Party were stood between the protest and parliament, and they had their guards facing the people, not the police,’ explains Alexandros. ‘We wanted to get to parliament, and they were in the way. So there were fights and stupid things from both sides.’ One man died.

A problem for the indignados since being evicted has been the stop-start nature of mobilisations. ‘There must have been a million on the streets on 12 February,’ says Sissi Korizi of the demonstrations against the Memorandum vote in parliament, ‘but now we wonder if all the effort was wasted. We have difficulties with coordination and we didn’t have anything organised to follow the 12th.’

Another level of fighting

Not everyone feels down. In an office a few streets from the ancient Agora where democracy was born, Nasos Iliopoulos, secretary of the youth wing of Synaspismos, the biggest party in the Syriza coalition, believes the trajectory is still upwards: ‘Every few months there is an event that is more than a demonstration but less than a revolt. And every time it gets bigger.’

‘The thing that was so great about Syntagma was that you could find people who had never been involved in struggles before,’ Nasos enthuses. ‘Now we have over 50 popular assemblies in Athens that are the places of struggle for the local situation. The Squares Movement has transformed into something more original. It’s another level of fighting austerity in everyday life.’

Nasos describes a new residential property tax for which payment is tied to the electricity bill: ‘It’s blackmail, if you don’t pay the tax your electric will be cut off.’ Popular assemblies have taken it up, people refuse to pay, and the union at the energy company has occupied the building where the bills are processed. Such ‘little victories’ mean ‘they can’t actually achieve austerity’....

"The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street Movement and protesters elsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations.."

people can work together towards justice even if there are initially differences, to also work through the differences, as noted in Greece, and in the New Scientist. Occupiers would appreciate the supports described in the former, and of the latter I think, even though they'd want to talk about the human-made laws governing TNCs.

In the Oscar Grant movement, multi-racial street militancy resulted in young black men facing serious charges, while white protesters largely saw their charges dropped. A legitimate debate arose in the movement, which I never felt was adequately addressed, around what we should do about this. Many black organizers pointed to the contradiction that a movement oriented towards ending police targeting of communities of color, was leading to the incarceration of more people of color. Most of the white street militants never really engaged this debate. The response was largely that white anti-capitalists don't have any control over what the police do and we must respect a diversity of tactics. Here we had a shining example of how the "non-violent" position and the "diversity of tactics" position both missed the mark completely...

Quote:

More fundamentally this critique is about the inherent problems involved with seeking state-sanctioned tools to protect people that inadvertently turn into highly effective instruments of police repression. We are all in the streets, in large part, because the State is not an arbiter of justice. Entrusting the State with legitimate jurisdiction over our actions does not guarantee security - it guarantees insecurity and future repression.

"Class war and imperialism have deepened in Greece. The Greek working class has been subjected to further attacks from the local and imperialist ruling classes. To receive the latest 'bailout' from the IMF and the ECB, the Greek state was told by the German, French and US ruling classes to again reduce pensions, to fully privatise public utilities, and to again cut social spending and wages.."

This training takes less than 1 hour to complete - and you don't have to finish it all at once. You’ll tell the story of how you’ve been impacted by the 1% economy, learn how we got here, and get the tools you need to plan an action in your own community this spring.

Occupy the Farm Activists Reclaim Prime Urban Agricultural Land in SF Bay Area

(Albany, Calif.), April 22, 2012 – Occupy the Farm, a coalition of local residents, farmers, students, researchers, and activists are planting over 15,000 seedlings at the Gill Tract, the last remaining 10 acres of Class I agricultural soil in the urbanized East Bay area. The Gill Tract is public land administered by the University of California, which plans to sell it to private developers.

For decades the UC has thwarted attempts by community members to transform the site for urban sustainable agriculture and hands-on education. With deliberate disregard for public interest, the University administrators plan to pave over this prime agricultural soil for commercial retail space, a Whole Foods, and a parking lot.

“For ten years people in Albany have tried to turn the Gill Tract into an Urban Farm and a more open space for the community. The people in the Bay Area deserve to use this treasure of land for an urban farm to help secure the future of our children,” explains Jackie Hermes-Fletcher, an Albany resident and public school teacher for 38 years....

Update, 12:30: Police in riot gear struck a 62-year old woman in an attempt to break the blockade Watch on livestream here! For further updates, see also #WF24 on Twitter.Update, 12 noon: An enthusiastic march of an estimated 600 people has arrived at the shareholders meeting and is holding a lively rally outside. Some Occupiers have established a nonviolent human blockade around the entrance to the meeting and have asked shareholders to respect their picket line. Some shareholders have been turned away. Large numbers of police are present and two helicopters are circling overhead.

** BREAKING NEWS UPDATE: Patients, healthcare providers, and advocates from the Mental Health Movement have occupied the (inside/lobby outside) of the Mayor's Office. There has been one arrest so far They say they are prepared to stay for days to draw attention to the crisis clinic closings have precipitated, and to demand a stay of execution for the clinics from Mayor Emanuel, Governor Quinn, and President Obama. **

Speakers at 5:15pm Mayor's Office press conference to include Dr. Quentin Young National Director of Physicians for a National Health Program former doctor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and therapists from all City mental health clinics

Today in the name of "connecting the dots" 350.org and stopcoal.ca hosted an event to stop all coal trains for a period of at least 24 hours and to remind people that we all have to become active in the fight for a better world.

The demonstration authorities of the city of Frankfurt announced in to the press on the afternoon of May 4, 2012, that they are prohibiting all of the actions planned by the Blockupy Frankfurt alliance from May 16-19. The legal notifying party for the more than fifteen actions was directly informed about this decision with regard to only one case – and even this was delayed by one day.

This decision completely prohibits the protests against crisis policies that profoundly affect the lives of millions of people in Europe. The alliance is planning protests during the action days against the austerity policies of European governments and the Troika (ECB, EU Commission and IMF) and had applied to the city for permits for some of these protests as demonstrations, rallies, pickets and demonstrative assemblies, as is legally required for demonstrations.

This prohibition is a uniquely scandalous incident in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany as well as an open breach of the constitutional right to demonstrate. We insist that the protest against crisis policies can take place in the Frankfurt financial district and at the headquarters of the ECB, as it is in accordance with the permanent jurisdiction of the German Federal Constitutional Court.

All democrats can only be extremely appalled by this illegitimate and undemocratic action and demand an immediate abandonment of this total ban. What was possible at Tahrir Square in Cairo, at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid or in Zucotti Park in New York must also be possible in Frankfurt am Main!

Please comment in English below, and share with your local assemblies / other groups for endorsement…

GlobalMay Manifesto

We are living in a world controlled by forces incapable of giving freedom and dignity to the world´s population (if, indeed, they ever were). A world where we are told ‘there is no alternative’ to the loss of rights achieved through the long, hard struggles of our ancestors.

We find ourselves in a world where success is defined in seeming opposition to the most fundamental values of humanity, such as solidarity and mutual support. Moreover, anything that does not promote competitiveness, selfishness and greed is seen as dysfunctional. This immoral ideology is reinforced by the monopoly of the mainstream media, the instrument that manufactures false consensus around this unfair and unsustainable system....

there are good ideas in the statement, however the 'commons' could include natural ecosystems. Also, the power of private banks to create credit/debt in government-taxable currency ought to be removed, because the allowance gives bankers additional power, which is unequal. Banks have used their undemocratic ability to simply type in 'deposit' in their ledgers, and collect interest, to lobby against the kind of good statements noted above, and to lobby for war, 'free trade' agreements, and other laws which give them even more unequal undemocratic power.